With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us, in turn, their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to Stéphane Dompierre.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Let me guess: at work, you feel like you’re a little slower than others, but that’s because you’re a perfectionist while your colleagues cut corners. You are also more reliable and efficient than most of them. In a car, you drive better than average. Even if sometimes you drive fast, you commit few imprudences and you have eyes all around your head to prevent bad maneuvers from motorists around you. You are constantly compensating for their incompetence.
In either case, you may be the victim of a cognitive bias, in this case a positive illusion bias.
A cognitive bias is an error in judgment or a shortcut that occurs on a daily basis when we try to interpret the world around us or when we try to understand ourselves.
Clairvoyance is based on this: “You have a deceased aunt or grandmother or cousin, there is the letter “m” in her first name, or in her name perhaps, or in that of an animal company she would have had, she wants to tell you that she loves you and that everything is going to be fine. This is a bias that leads us to believe that generalities apply specifically to us.
Some biases are useful to us on a daily basis. They may even have saved our lives for thousands of years. When we think we see a human face or an animal form in the darkness of the forest, this perception awakens our senses and encourages us to protect ourselves. If the threat turns out to be real, we are a little more ready to face it. To be able to make decisions in our daily life, we have to use shortcuts, put aside certain information. Without cognitive biases, we would take hours to analyze each daily gesture before making it.
We can tell ourselves that we are a unique individual, a free thinker, that we have created ourselves through thousands of diverse experiences, that we are like no one else, at the end of the day. account our personality is, in part, a more or less cumbersome assembly of cognitive biases.
Social networks help to reinforce our confirmation bias, which consists of retaining only information that confirms our belief and leaving out information that contradicts it. “I believe in ghosts, so I’m not going to read those articles that explain the phenomenon scientifically. There is also attention bias, when our perceptions are influenced by our interests. “It’s great, my whole network loves to read and takes the protection of the environment to heart! »
“I was just thinking about you, I knew you were going to call me!” It’s a bias that makes us say with confidence that we knew something was going to happen. We would never have said it before the event happened, but once the result is there, “I knew it! “.
“The instructions for securely mounting a shelf to drywall are way too long and complicated. I’m going to use my instincts instead. I abuse that one a lot. This is a bias that causes incompetent people to overestimate their skills. Anything related to renovation or construction, directly or indirectly, is a problem for me. I find it difficult to put down even a simple shelf without destroying everything and abandoning the project, but I don’t learn from my mistakes. I approach a wall with my drill unloaded and my blind confidence telling myself that this time, that’s it, I’m going to beat it, despite the fact that I haven’t learned any useful skills since the previous massacre.
They say you have to have 10,000 hours of practice before you can claim to be an expert at something. Devote 35 hours a week to it, so it would take me five years to be really competent and reliable in renovations.
It’s an average, of course, and it doesn’t apply to everything. It’s harder to master the cello or the concept of quantum physics than the latest choreography on TikTok. (Although, in my case, that remains to be seen.)
Despite my recent passion for unconscious biases, which define us without us realizing it, I’m not an expert in the subject, so I’ll stop pestering you right now. I’m not going to do like too many people, give myself an air of confidence and pose as an expert after skimming through a few articles. Go google, you will quickly know as much as I do on the subject.
Ah yes, I forgot: if you believe that you are the type of extremely lucid person who escapes bias, know that there are 250 listed. So allow me to doubt it!